Consumers commonly enjoy the convenience of packaged food products such as dough products. In particular, raw dough products have gained commercial success as provided in frozen or refrigerated forms to facilitate consumers making home-baked dough products. Moreover, such raw dough products are typically packaged to facilitate consumer use, as desired. Potential consumers of such refrigerated or frozen dough products include individual in-home consumers, as well as in-store bakeries and restaurants that bake cookies on-site and sell the cookies to consumers at the bakery or restaurant.
Many dough products suitable for packaging as frozen or refrigerated products have been developed. As an example, sweet dough products such as certain types of cookies are frequently packaged in frozen or refrigerated forms. More recently, these frozen or refrigerated cookie dough products designed for home consumers have been provided as a separable block, where the consumer must first separate the individual portions of the block prior to baking. Another format for home consumer frozen or refrigerated cookie dough products provides individual cookie pucks, or preformed cookies, that the consumer simply transfers from the packaging to a baking pan for baking at the appropriate temperature. According to this latter format, no manipulation of the dough product is required by the consumer.
One type of dough used to produce cookies is a comparatively stiff, dry and crumbly dough of the type which when baked produces relatively hard cookies (for example, animal cookies and the typically round wafers that are often made into cookie sandwiches by placing a layer of frosting or confection between a pair of them). This type of baking dough typically lends itself to rotary molding devices, as it can easily be compressed into relatively shallow configured cavities in the rotary die, the cavity design and hardness of dough contributing to a clean complete release from such cavities subsequent to shaping. Typically, these dry doughs are characterized by containing comparatively low sugar and low shortening, typically in the range of 20–25 baker's percent of each.
Another type of dough used to produce cookies is “soft” dough, from which softer baked goods are made, in particular the soft type of cookies regarded as being more like homemade cookies. Such soft dough is considerably more flowable as well as more sticky than the drier dough discussed above. Further, such soft doughs typically will not pack in the same sense as the drier cookie doughs and are thus much more difficult to force into the configured die cavities and the like of a rotary molding device so as to completely fill them. Such soft doughs are typically more suitable for wirecut processes of manufacturing. The soft cookie dough is generally characterized by comparatively high sugar and high shortening content, typically in the range of 50–70 baker's percent or more, for each ingredient. Generally, soft cookie doughs possess adequate cohesiveness to hold together, yet yield clean separations of the individual dough pieces as the individual dough pieces are cut by a conventional wirecut apparatus.
As mentioned above, one known method for making cookie products on a mass production basis utilizes a wire cutting operation. According to this process, appropriately formulated dough is fed from a hopper downwardly through one or more nozzles located above a conveyor. As the dough leaves a nozzle in the form of a dough cylinder, a cutting wire is passed through the dough so that discrete pieces of dough are separated from the dough cylinder to fall or be placed onto the conveyor. The dough pieces on the conveyor can then be collected from the conveyor for packaging and storage at refrigerated or frozen temperatures. Wirecut methods provide a high-speed method for making cookies, typically producing about 1800 cookies or more per minute depending on extrusion and conveyor speeds as well as on the number of forming orifices provided by one or more forming heads.
In certain applications, it may be desirable to provide an ornamental design or imprint on the surface of sweet cookie dough products, to create the appearance of a home-baked dough product. For example, with peanut butter cookies, one technique commonly practiced in the home is to press or pat raw cookie dough with a fork after formulating the dough and prior to baking, to create a tine appearance on the surface of a cookie. Although such manual patterning of the dough in the home provides an aesthetically pleasing product after it is baked, such manual pattering is not usable in high speed cookie manufacturing processes that are practiced on a plant scale. Moreover, alignment of a desired pattern is difficult when manufacturing cookies on a large scale. Alignment is even more difficult when the dough is provided as individual dough pieces. Moreover, the act of contacting an individual dough piece with a patterning or stamping apparatus can alter the dough piece, by picking up the dough piece, moving the dough piece on the conveyor, and/or providing a deformed pattern (for example, a smeared pattern if the dough piece is moving when the pattern is applied), or even a deformed dough piece. These problems can be exacerbated at the high speeds of wire cutting processes described above.